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You Can Always Count on Crime: Mystery by the Numbers.

Graff, Keir (author).

Titling books is hard—titling books in series is even harder. When you think about it, you can’t really blame prolific authors such as Sue Grafton (whose Alphabet series recently reached V Is for Vengeance, 2011) or Janet Evanovich (whose Stephanie Plum series counts Notorious Nineteen, 2012) for taking the easy way out. Or maybe you can. Either way, at least Grafton has an end in sight, while Evanovich will presumably write to infinity.

We set ourselves a challenge: Could we count from 1 to 50 using crime-fiction titles? Moreover, could we do it without any books by Evanovich or the less-known Elizabeth Gunn (who also has a numbered formula)? Read on to see if we succeeded. A side note: using numbers in book titles is clearly a winning formula. When we gathered our first group of books for this list, we were surprised to find that, out of 100 books, 43 had received starred reviews!